From the White House to Main Street, urban sprawl is the latest
environmental crisis vexing America. The Clinton Administration
and environmentalists warn that urban sprawl, or unregulated suburban
development, undermines our quality of life. They argue that urban
sprawl exacerbates traffic congestion, scars the landscape with
ungainly strip malls and consumes the scenic open space that attracts
people to the suburbs in the first place. Even more alarming,
Vice President Albert Gore says, if steps aren't taken now to
curb sprawl, urbanization will consume so much farmland that the
United States may run out of enough agricultural land to feed
itself in the 21st century and, for the first time in the nation's
history, become a net importer of food.

So serious is the threat allegedly posed
by sprawl that the Administration has proposed a $10 billion program
aimed at combating its pernicious effects by funding more mass
transit programs, increasing the purchase of land for parks and
open space and funding other projects ostensibly aimed at improving
the quality of suburban living.

But the threat posed by sprawl to rustic
open spaces and farmland is grossly overstated by the Clinton
Administration. While the Administration plays upon people's understandable
but misguided fears about the destruction of open space, the record
from the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Soil Conservation Service
show that less than 5% of the United States is developed. Moreover,
for several decades now, the amount of land that is dedicated
to parks and other conservation uses has greatly exceeded the
amount of land that has been urbanized.

What is most disturbing about the crusade
against urban sprawl is that anti-sprawl activists portray their
agenda of "smart-growth" initiatives as "pro-suburban"
to receptive voters concerned about improving the quality of life
in their communities. In reality, anti-sprawl policies are profoundly
anti-suburban. In cities such as Portland, Oregon, where aggressive
anti-sprawl policies have been implemented, government planners
have deliberately tried to increase traffic congestion, not diminish
it, and have tried to force people to live in smaller houses in
more crowded urban-like neighborhoods. To these activists, suburbs
are the cause of sprawl, and the only way to stop sprawl is to
dissuade people from moving to the suburbs. The campaign against
urban sprawl is perilously close to a campaign against the American
Dream.

Urban Sprawl Poses No Threat
to the Nation's Open Spaces

Politically, the Clinton Administration's
crusade against sprawl makes good sense as it resonates with voters.
In the November 1998 elections, there were 240 state and local
ballot measures designed to preserve parks and open spaces and
implement other "smart growth" initiatives. Voters approved
more than 170 of these ballot measures which will result in the
expenditure of more than $4 billion in taxes, bonds and lottery
money.1 In addition, 19 states have adopted statewide growth management
plans to combat sprawl or started task forces to study farmland
loss.2

The motivation for these initiatives is
understandable. Many people are concerned that rapid, sometimes
seemingly haphazard, development is consuming much of the scenic
open space that helps make suburban living so attractive. The
Clinton Administration has been quick to exploit the uneasiness
many Americans have about development to advance its case for
federal control over land decisions that have traditionally been
the purview of local communities. On January 11, 1999, Vice President
Gore announced the Administration's "Livability Agenda,"
a myriad of proposals to combat sprawl by providing resources
to preserve open space, promote clean air and water, sustain wildlife
and ease traffic congestion. The $10 billion initiative includes
a record $6.1 billion for mass transit, $570 million for bike
paths and pedestrian walkways and a five-year $700 million program
of tax credits to secure no-interest "Better America Bonds."
These bonds would allow states and cities to leverage as much
as $10 billion to acquire land for open space and parks.3

To make the case for this kind of program,
Vice President Albert Gore paints a bleak picture of the American
landscape today. "From the desert Southwest to the forested
Northeast, from the most pristine snowfields of Alaska, to the
loveliest hollows of the Carolinas - thickets of strip development
distort the landscape our grandparents remember," Vice President
Gore has said. "Acre upon acre of asphalt have transformed
what were once mountain clearings and congenial villages into
little more than massive parking lots."4

But the Administration's assertion that
the U.S. is in danger of running out of open space due to unbridled
suburbanization is unfounded and needlessly exacerbates public
anxiety over the issue. Only 4.8% of the nation's land is developed.5
That means that after more than 200 years of rapid industrial
development and an explosion in population from 4 million to 265
million people, more than 95% of U.S. land area remains undeveloped.
Many people perceive sprawl as a problem because they constantly
see new developments being built. Because 75% of the nation's
population lives on just 3.5% of the land, development tends to
be concentrated in small areas near cities - precisely the areas
where people will see it on their way to and from work.

The reality is that, in more than three
quarters of the states, over 90% of the land is in rural use such
as forests, cropland, pasture, wildlife reserves and parks.6 In
even the most urbanized state in the nation, New Jersey, less
than one-third of the land is developed, while the rest is rural.
Furthermore, within metropolitan areas themselves a large percentage
of the land is rural or agricultural in nature.7 For example,
Michigan is the 11th most urbanized state. In Michigan, urban
areas make up 26.8% of the state's land area. Even in Michigan's
urban areas, however, almost 60% of the land is used for rural
or agricultural purposes. On average, counties with large cities
dedicate more than 40% of their area to cropland, grasslands,
pasture and forest.8

Despite the overwhelming amount of undeveloped
land, politicians and environmentalists can easily mislead the
public into thinking there is a serious loss of open space through
the clever, even deceptive, use of statistics. Despite the abundance
of open space, cropland and wilderness, many Americans are under
the impression that much of this land has disappeared. The reason?
Environmentalists cite statistics like "Michigan is losing
rural land at the rate of 10 acres an hour" or "Ohio
is losing 5 acres an hour"9 or "the Washington, D.C.
metropolitan area is losing 21 football fields a day."10

But these statistics don't tell the whole
story. They don't, for example, tell the public that more acres
of land are being set aside for rural parks and wilderness areas
than are being developed. The ratio of land being set aside for
rural parks and wilderness areas is much higher than the ratio
of land undergoing development. Between 1949 and 1992, the amount
of urbanized land increased from 18.2 million acres to 57.9 million
acres, an increase of 39.7 million acres. But the amount of land
set aside for parks and wilderness areas was even greater, increasing
from 27.7 million acres to 86.9 million acres, an increase of
59.2 million acres. In other words, the nation has protected one-third
more land than it has developed since World War II.11

Concerns that open space will disappear
in future years if suburbanization is left unchecked by government-imposed
growth controls are similarly unfounded. The rate at which land
is being used for suburban development is .0006% per year.12 With
such a low urbanization rate, the United States will have open
space well into the foreseeable future.

Food Supply is Not Threatened
by Urban Sprawl

Critics of development often argue that
development is consuming so much farmland that the United States
will lose its ability to feed itself in the next century. Vice
President Gore, for example, stated that "America, which
is losing 50 acres of farmland to development each hour, could
become the largest net importer of food, instead of the world's
largest exporter, by the next century."13

Even though there is little evidence to
suggest that this kind of an agricultural crisis will occur, many
Americans now believe it is imminent. In 1998, for example, members
of a local Utah Future Farmers of America club wrote essays for
Earth Day on the future of farming. A common theme of these essays
was the concern that there would be no land in the future to farm
- despite the fact that 99% of Utah's land is still undeveloped.14
To date, seven states have started task forces to specifically
devise ways to stop farmland loss to urbanization.15

Dr. Samuel Staley of the Reason Public
Policy Institute notes that, at first glance, a significant decline
in farms and farmland acreage in the 20th century can leave one
with the impression that there will be farmland shortages in the
coming decades. Between 1950 and 1997, the amount of land dedicated
to agricultural activity fell from 1.2 billion acres to 968 million
acres, a decrease of 19.3%. The greatest losses in farmland occurred
in the 1960s when the nation lost an average of 7.3 million acres
annually.16

Anti-sprawl activists point to this dramatic
decline as evidence that sprawl will rapidly consume farmland
in the near future. However, Staley points out that since the
1960s the amount of farmland loss has significantly moderated.
During the 1970s, the nation lost an average of 6.3 million acres
of farmland per year, an average of 5.2 million acres in the 1980s,
and just 2.6 million acres in the 1990s.17

An analysis of farmland loss patterns
in representative states provides perspective on how remote a
threat sprawl poses to farmland. In California, for instance,
the state lost 5.7% of its farmland to development during the
1960s. Had that rate continued, California would have lost all
of its farmland in 140 years. However, by the 1990s the rate of
farmland loss had declined to just 3.7%, which means that the
state has another 400 years at the present rate of development
before it runs out of farmland. Other states show similar patterns.
During the 1960s, Michigan lost 2.7 million acres of farmland
to development. Had that rate continued the state would have run
out of farmland in 50 years. By the 1970s, however, the state
lost just 1.3 million acres, leaving the state with 100 years
of farmland, assuming this development rate continued. Now, at
1990s acreage loss rates, Michigan has at least another 200 years
of farmland left. Minnesota lost nearly 5% of its farmland in
the 1960s, a rate that would have led to the disappearance of
all farmland in 200 years. But by the 1980s and 1990s, the loss
rate fell to just 1%. At this rate, Minnesota will continue to
have farmland for at least another 1,500 years.18

More important than the moderating rates
of farmland loss is the fact that urbanization doesn't even appear
to be the chief cause of declining farmland acreage. The main
reason for the reduction in farmland is improved technology and
the economics of the agricultural industry. A study by Ohio State
University economist Luther Tweeten estimated that only 26% of
the farmland loss between 1949 and 1992 was due to urbanization.
The other 74% was due to changes in the economic fortunes of the
agricultural industry.19 In Indiana, for example, farmland acreage
fell by 645,000 acres between 1982 and 1992. Yet, urbanization
accounted for only 139,000 acres, or 22% of the total.20

Notwithstanding losses in farmland acreage,
agricultural land is still nearly 20 times the area of cities.21

What is often overlooked in the farmland
debate is that major technological advances in food production
require less and less farmland to produce record crop yields.
The United States Department of Agriculture's (USDA) index of
national farm output shows that the United States increased its
food production by nearly 48% since 1970, despite a reduction
in agricultural acreage. The U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis
shows that total farm income increased by 63% between 1980 and
1994.22 The value of farm production is expected to grow nearly
26% even though the number of farms continues to decline and the
number of farmworkers is expected to fall by 4.9%.23

The impressive growth in agricultural
production is attributable to a number of factors, including advancements
in the use of fertilizer, pesticides, irrigation and other technologies.
According to Ohio State's Tweeten, capital investments account
for more than two-thirds of agriculture's productivity while land
accounts for 20% - and its share is declining.24

Before claiming that urban sprawl poses
a significant threat to the U.S. food supply, Vice President Gore
should have checked with his own USDA. In a 1997 report, the USDA's
Economic Research Service concluded that "losing farmland
to urban uses does not threaten total cropland or the level of
agricultural production which should be sufficient to meet food
and fiber demand into the next century."25

Urban Sprawl is Anti-Suburban

The greatest irony of the urban sprawl
debate is that the Clinton Administration has tailored its anti-sprawl
proposals to appeal to suburban residents frustrated with congestion
and concerned about the loss of scenic open space when, in fact,
the anti-sprawl campaign is at its core anti-suburban.

Environmentalists, urban planners, central
city governments and a school of anti-suburban architects called
New Urbanists are the primary advocates of initiatives to control
urban sprawl and their common article of faith is that the source
of sprawl is the very existence of suburbs themselves. To these
anti-sprawl crusaders, the only way to combat urban sprawl is
to force people to live in smaller homes or - even better - apartments
and force them to reduce their use of automobiles. In other words,
get rid of the suburbs.

The Sierra Club has a smart-growth web
site called "The Conservation Potential of Compact Growth"
which rails against the traditional American preference for the
single-family home. Apartments and townhouses should be the preferred
choice of accommodation, according to the Sierra Club, because
they require fewer resources and save energy. Says the web site,
"Sharing walls shares and saves heat... The single family
home consumes four times as much land for streets and roads and
ten times as much for the houses themselves. The single family
house uses nearly six times as much metal and concrete, the mining
of which threatens to destroy many of our natural areas."26
To the Sierra Club, the American Dream of owning your own home
is a wasteful, selfish indulgence that Americans should give up
if they want to be environmentally responsible.

The automobile is especially vilified
by the anti-sprawl activists. Suburban living would not be popular
without the automobile because the

American people have historically been
reluctant to use public transportation. The American people overwhelmingly
prefer the automobile to publicly-financed buses and light rail
systems as the car is the only mode of transportation that affords
people the convenience and independence upon which they place
high value. For anti-sprawl activists, however, the automobile,
requiring its network of roads and freeways, is the raw fuel for
sprawl. To stop sprawl means to force people out of their cars.

This is a central tenet of the New Urbanists,
a school of urban architects who want to build cities that don't
require cars. The New Urbanists take as their model 19th century
cities.27 In these cities, more people lived in apartments, and
the single family homes that did exist were row houses on tiny
plots of land often mingled with retail shops, professional offices
and other businesses. So the New Urban design, the antidote to
urban sprawl, is a significantly more urban neighborhood more
akin to a turn-of-the-century New York City neighborhood than
a typical 1990's suburb.

The Portland Lesson

Portland, Oregon is the Mecca for anti-sprawl
activists. Its highly restrictive growth limits that aim to stop
further development and heavy investment into mass transit epitomize
the kind of policies anti-sprawl activists would like to see implemented
everywhere. Says Alan Ehrenhalt in Governing magazine, "It
sometimes seems as if the whole country is looking to Portland
as a role model for 21st century urban development."28

Let's hope not.

A regional planning agency in Portland,
called Metro, has been given the authority to regulate growth
in 24 cities and three counties. In its 40-year plan to manage
growth, Metro aims to accommodate 700,000 to 1.1 million new residents
within its existing Urban Growth Boundary by radically increasing
the residential densities in existing neighborhoods.29 Metro's
anti-sprawl campaign includes eight initiatives:

* Establishing an Urban Growth Boundary
beyond which little or no development will be allowed.

* Imposing highly restrictive zoning
within the Urban Growth Boundary which requires landowners who
are allowed to build at all to only construct buildings with
high residential densities that increase congestion.

* Increasing highway capacity by no more
than 13%, even as the region's population grows by 75%, in the
40-year period.

* Spending most of the region's federal
and local transportation money not on roads but on a light-rail
mass transit system even though the system will carry no more
than 2% of the area's daily commuters.

* Requiring owners of shopping and office
complexes to reduce parking space by 10% and eventually charge
for parking.

* Banning new shopping malls and stores
like Wal-Mart.

* Subsidizing small shops in mixed-use
areas.

* Instituting "traffic calming"
measures, such as reducing the number of lanes on major streets,
to reduce roadway capacities.30

To achieve higher living densities, Metro
wants to shrink the average lot size for a single-family home
by almost a third, from 9,000 square feet to 6,700 square feet.
In some neighborhoods, it plans to restrict lot sizes to as little
as 2,900 square feet.31

Because of the anti-sprawl controls, housing
prices have soared in Portland. The city went from being one of
the nation's most affordable cities to one of the five or six
least affordable. Proponents of Metro blame these rising costs
on Portland's booming economy. This ignores the fact that other
western cities, - including Phoenix, Las Vegas and Salt Lake City
- have experienced even greater growth than Portland while keeping
housing costs under control. The difference between Portland and
these cities is that Portland has implemented onerous anti-sprawl
controls while the other cities have not.32

It is ironic that many of the anti-sprawl
regulations imposed to improve environmental quality actually
have the opposite results. Under Portland's Metro plan, traffic
congestion is likely to triple because officials plan to increase
highway capacity by no more than 13% even though the population
is predicted to jump 75%. Such congestion is not only inconvenient
because it increases commuters' time on the road, but it is also
unhealthy for the environment. The more time people spend on the
road, the more automobile emissions there will be.33 Indeed, cities
with the highest densities also have the highest smog ratings.34

That is not what most people have in mind
when they support initiatives to limit sprawl. Even the Vice President
says that one of the biggest motivations for the Administration's
"Livability Agenda" is to enable commuters to get home
in time to read bedtime stories to their children.35 Yet, the
anti-sprawl activists the Administration proposes giving billions
of dollars to support policies that exacerbate congestion.

What happened in Portland should serve
as a warning to other communities that are considering anti-sprawl
initiatives of their own and the Administration's promise of federal
dollars. In 1992, the citizens of Portland voted to give Metro
greater powers to regulate growth because Metro promised that
it would save Portland from turning into Los Angeles, the counter
Mecca of congestion, sprawl and overreliance on the automobile.36

What Metro planners didn't tell the voters
was that Los Angeles was precisely the kind of congestion they
wanted to replicate in Portland.

In 1994, Metro planners examined 50 U.S.
cities

to see which one had the elements they
deemed most effective at countering sprawl - highest population
density, lowest number of freeway miles and most spending on a
new rail system. The answer was Los Angeles. Portland's Metro
planners said that Los Angeles "represents the investment
pattern we desire to replicate." Of course, Metro never mentions
this in the glossy brochures it distributes to the public to tout
its regional planning strategy.37 Already, the commuting speed
in Los Angeles, 32 miles per hour within the central city, is
better than Portland's 27 miles per hour.38

National Public Radio's "All Things
Considered" noted that while most transportation planners
try to ease congestion, Portland's planners "are embracing
congestion; they want to create more of it." Metro planner
Mark Turpel approvingly says that Portland has become so congested
that "people are learning to walk more in these neighborhoods."
Economist Randal O'Toole, a leading critic of Portland's planning
policy, says that, thanks to Portland's planners, once-pleasant
residential streets are now clogged with traffic, busy streets
have been turned into one continuous traffic jam and people must
park many blocks away from where they want to shop. But that doesn't
seem to bother anti-sprawl politicians. U.S. Representative Earl
Blumenaeur, who represents Portland, says that this "is the
kind of congestion that is exciting."39

Portland is not the only city, however,
that has implemented anti-sprawl policies that deliberately encourage
congestion. Minnesota's Twin Cities Metropolitan Council has announced
that it will not build any roads in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area
for the next 20 years in the hope that the resulting congestion
will make mass transit more attractive. "As traffic congestion
builds, alternative travel modes will become more attractive,"
noted the Council. Texas state Senator Gonzalo Barrientos, Chairman
of the Austin Transportation Study which developed a 25-year plan
for the area, bragged that even though the population in the Austin
area will increase by 100% by 2020, "Our plan calls for only
a 33% increase in highways."40

Longer commutes, more congestion, more
apartments, smaller houses, smaller yards and less personal freedom.
That is the result of initiatives to combat urban sprawl. And
that is precisely the opposite of what voters think they are getting
when they support proposals to contain growth and preserve open
space.

Conclusion

The Clinton Administration's campaign
against urban sprawl is deeply flawed in that it purports to combat
problems that don't exist (such as disappearing farmland), grossly
exaggerates the amount of open space that is consumed by urbanization
and, worst of all, encourages anti-sprawl policies that are anti-suburban.
What is especially ironic about the Administration's crusade against
sprawl is that the anti-sprawl program is also anti-environment.

Anti-sprawl initiatives are inaccurately
portrayed as efforts to improve the quality of suburban living
by reducing congestion. Yet, the deliberate goal of anti-sprawl
activists, such as the Sierra Club and New Urbanist planners,
is to deliberately promote policies that exacerbate traffic congestion
and force people to live in crowded cities. Since high density
urban areas almost always have the worst air pollution, the likely
result of a federally-financed campaign to restrict growth to
less healthy urban areas in the name of protecting undeveloped
open space would be to worsen the quality of the nation's environment.
Hence, the Clinton Administration's campaign against urban sprawl
is not just another wasteful spending program to fight an environmental
crisis that doesn't exist; it could very well create environmental
problems that we don't yet have.